Top 489 Quotes & Sayings by Rainer Maria Rilke
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a German novelist Rainer Maria Rilke.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.
Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.
A person isn't who they are during the last conversation you had with them - they're who they've been throughout your whole relationship.
I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.
All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you.
There are so many things about which some old man ought to tell one while one is little; for when one is grown one would know them as a matter of course.
No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.
Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.
Truly to sing, that is a different breath.
Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.
There may be good, but there are no pleasant marriages.
He reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there's another dog.
Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.
It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.
Believe that with your feelings and your work you are taking part in the greatest; the more strongly you cultivate this belief, the more will reality and the world go forth from it.
There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.
Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.
The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.
And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been.
I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.
Love is like the measles. The older you get it, the worse the attack.
Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
More belongs to marriage than four legs in a bed.
The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.
This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.
For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.
The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.
The only journey is the one within.
All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.
Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.
It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning.
One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one.
Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.
There are no classes in life for beginners; right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.
Where something becomes extremely difficult and unbearable, there we also stand always already quite near its transformation.
If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.
If we surrendered to earth's intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.
I am so glad you are here. It helps me realize how beautiful my world is.
Where I create, there I am true.
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart.
Who speaks of conquering? To endure is everything.
Quiet friend who has come so far, feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change. What is it like, such intensity of pain? If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine. In this uncontainable night, be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses, the meaning discovered there. And if the world has ceased to hear you, say to the silent earth: I flow. To the rushing water, speak: I am.
Let everything happen to you Beauty and terror Just keep going No feeling is final
The highest form of love is to be the protector of another person’s solitude.
Perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.
Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.
It is always what I have already said: always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, in any case.
I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed, for where I am closed, I am false.
This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.
Think... of the world you carry within you, and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own - only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. What is happening in your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it.
To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. Love is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world for himself for another's sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.
Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.
God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. Flare up like a flame and make big shadows I can move in. Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don't let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand.
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Do not despair if the answers don't come immediately. Some answers are only revealed with the passage of time.
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everthing in me that is bewildered and confused.
You have had many sadnesses, large ones, which passed. ... But please, ask yourself whether these large sadnesses haven't rather gone right through you [that is, passed through you]. Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.
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